The bored antihero became prominent in early 20th century existentialist works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915),[43] Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausée (1938) (French for 'Nausea'),[44] and Albert Camus' L'Étranger (1942) (French for 'The Stranger').[45] The protagonist in these works is an indecisive central character who drifts through his life and is marked by ennui, angst, and alienation.[46]
There are three types of boredom, all of which involve problems of engagement of attention. These include times when we are prevented from engaging in wanted activity, when we are forced to engage in unwanted activity, or when we are simply unable for some other reason to maintain engagement in an activity.[13] Boredom proneness is a tendency to experience boredom of all types. This is typically assessed by the Boredom Proneness Scale.[14] Recent research has found that boredom proneness is clearly and consistently associated with failures of attention.[15] Boredom and its proneness are both theoretically and empirically linked to depression and similar symptoms.[16][17][18] Nonetheless, boredom proneness has been found to be as strongly correlated with attentional lapses as with depression.[16] Although boredom is often viewed as a trivial and mild irritant, proneness to boredom has been linked to a very diverse range of possible psychological, physical, educational, and social problems.[19]
These authors suggest that attention plays an important role in creating boredom. In particular, there are a few conditions that need to be met for people to feel bored. First, people need to have a reasonable level of psychological energy or arousal to feel bored. When people have low arousal and there is not much happening in the world, then they often feel relaxed. When they have high arousal, though, they have energy they would like to devote to something, but they cannot find anything engaging.
“Time is quixotic because it can torment us. When we have insufficient stimulus to fill our lives, we resent the relentless quality of time, and we engage in activities designed to “kill time.” Time that passes slowly creates insufferable boredom; time that passes to quickly makes us aware of our accelerated death march. A person’s perspective on time depends mostly on what they are most afraid of, boredom or death.”
Second, boredom typically occurs when people have trouble focusing their attention and they believe the reason for this difficulty is in the environment. When sitting in the airport, for example, there is probably a lot going on. There are people having conversations that you could listen to. You probably have something to read. There may be televisions showing the news. But, the stress of waiting for a delayed flight often makes it hard to concentrate, and so your mind jumps from one thing to another. You assume that this is caused by the environment, and so you feel boredom.
Boredom is a universal experience. Almost everyone suffers from it in the course of their lives. Existing survey estimates show that between 30 percent and 90 percent of American adults experience boredom at some point in their daily lives, as do 91 percent to 98 percent of youth (Chin et al., 2017). Men are generally more bored than women. There is also a positive link between very low educational attainment and boredom.